Mandres, Kilkis

History

Ambar Koy was mainly a Slavic speaking settlement and its population intermarried with other Slavic speaking villages in the area. In the early 1900s, Vasil Kanchov stated that the local population was composed of 300 Bulgarians and 66 Turks, whereas Hilmi Pasha described the village as inhabited only by 195 Bulgarians. During the period of the Balkan Wars, the Greek army destroyed the settlement and it was repopulated by people from the village of Mandritsa in Bulgaria. Until World War II, relatives from both villages would visit each other.

In the 1980s only middle aged and elderly generations within the village had knowledge of an Albanian dialect. The Mandres Albanian dialect is similar to that of Mandritsa and sharply differs from other varieties of the Albanian language. For example the gender system (masculine and feminine) present in all varieties of Albanian has disappeared from the Mandres Albanian dialect due to influence from the Turkish language when the population in the past lived near Turkey.

References

References

1. "Πανδέκτης: Nivitsa -- Mandres".
2. Karakasidou, Anastasia N.. (1997). "Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia". University of Chicago Press.
3. Michailidis, Iakovos D.. (2007). "The History of Macedonia". Museum of the Macedonian Struggle.
4. Alatis, James E.. (1978). "International Dimensions of Bilingual Education". Georgetown University Press.
5. Hamp, Eric. (1992). "Investigating obsolescence: Studies in language contraction and death". Cambridge University Press.
6. Hamp, Eric. (1992). "Indo-European Numerals". Mouton de Gruyter.
7. Friedman, Victor A.. (1994). "Slavic-Albanian Contacts and Early Polyglot Lexicons: The Albanian Lexicon of the Monk Arkádïi, A Mid-Nineteenth Century Manuscript from the Hilendar Monastery on Mount Athos". Slavia meridionalis: Studia linguistica, slavica et balcanica.
8. Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y.. (2016). "How gender shapes the world". Oxford University Press.